Whenever we talk about Mac clone makers such as Psystar, we all more or less accept as a fact that Apple is selling copies of its Mac OS X operating system at a price lower than it would have been if Apple did not have a hardware business. Even though we treat this statement as fact - recently, I've been wondering: where is the proof?

Subsidizing or not is entirely irrelevant, aside from being flamewar fuel.

What is happening here is that Psystar is -- unquestionably -- violating the EULA *and* decrypting Apple's stuff without permissions to produce a Mac-less OS X distribution.

The point is: is the EULA enforceable? And/or: is decrypting this way circumvention of technological countermeasures as defined by US and EU laws? If either is true, Psystar is most likely breaking the law, and thus would find itself in big, big trouble.

Subsidization doesn't even begin to enter the picture here. The price of OS X is irrelevant to the above. It could be free or 10k per seat, and the above would still entirely apply.

I may be missing something as I haven't been watching this thing closely. What decryption or circumvention of countermeasures are they doing? My understanding was that the the firmware is an industry standard just like BIOS so there is no circumvention in using it. A boot loader isn't a circumvention either. It's not like they are doing a kernel modification between boot loader and Darwin startup.

From what I can tell, Psystar buys retail copies of osX and installs them on compatible hardware; no modification of osX to do so. This appears to be contractually questionable but there is no real technological hurdle involved.